Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part III
We have tried to get at what we could call the mandala principle. We have done this by considering the analogy of a hologram—and thinking of life itself, the living, loving cosmos and world—as a dynamic hologram, a magical, dancing hologram presencing the inconceivable intwerwovenness of all things, moment to moment.
The interwovenness defies our habitual mind. For instance, if you look at me, you think I show up “outside” of you. You point to me and say, “You are over there.” But, in some sense, we might say I actually show up for you “in there,” “in” “you”. And there is no “me” showing up “over here,” or “in here,” inside of what I might identify as “me,” or name “me,” otherwise there would be an “object” “here” where there is only a luminous and knowing spaciousness, a spaciousness that always has room for you to appear, along with the forest, the sky, the moon, the stars.
But things actually presence more mystery than this. Consider: Where, really, would you locate your experience? Experience itself isn’t material. We cannot ever, ever, ever find our experience inside our skull, inside our “body”. If we open our skull, we find neurons, but no experience. Where does it arise?
Somehow or other, if we look with care, we find no “there” in our experience. All our experience must arise as a *here* that transcends ordinary time and space, beyond the duality of here-and-there.
The whole World shows up *here*, and it need not do so with or as the habit, the practice and the realization, of a reified subject-object duality. Out of habitual ignorance, we separate appearance and awareness. Our practice can heal this duality, which can also heal the world.
“I” show up for the trees, and the trees show up for “me”. Intimately and immediately, in an altogetherness and interwovenness, we know each other, even if what “I” call “my conscious mind” lacks access to this knowing. This is not “knowledge” in the sense of a subject who “knows” an object of knowledge. We could refer to it as gnosis, indicating something transcending the duality between knower and known. Even at a basic level, the trees show up in my lungs, in my bones and flesh. From the deeper sense of interwovenness, the tree can never be separated from me, and any conceptual separation can mislead us if we don’t take care.
Keeping things kind of simplified, the eyes open, and: “Tree!”
We don’t have to “do” anything. Tree shows up, verifying the Self we really are when we have forgotten (not merely lost) the self we think we know, and simply let Tree appear. Tree shows up HERE, NOW, though, from one perspective, seeming to be “over there”.
If we walk over to touch the tree, once we get there, only part of the tree appears—speaking quite relatively. By the time we touch the tree, even though we touch the whole Cosmos, relatively speaking we touch a part. The whole tree shows up, filling the Cosmos, but we touch only part of it if we forget this, remembering the “self” instead.
Tree exists in a state of grace, never trying to be what it isn’t. But we humans try to be what we are not: Something localized, something with a face other than the Face of the Divine, the Face of the Mystery. That’s probably too poetic for some of us, but, then, what are we trying to be at moments when the poetic or the mystical sound too poetic or mystical?
Nondual knowing stops trying to “know the world,” because, so to speak, first we must know ourselves. We go around trying to “know” the world, but we don’t know the knower. When we begin to find “problems” in the world, we must STOP. Evidently what we do creates problems. Is that because we show up for the World as a problem? The World has no “conscious purposes,” and so it never intends to show up for us as a problem. Only when we practice the knowing and doing that go together with conscious purposes do we find problems.
Let us just once more consider this strange possibility: Could each of us point at the Earth (as opposed to “the organism,” or our body, our head, or some other part) and say, “That’s me! That’s us!” Could we say that of the World, of the Cosmos?
When Black Elk shared his vision, he described a series of ascensions, and a view of the Hoop of the Nation (what we might call the Sacred Circle of Beings). At one point he even becomes an eagle. Then he is riding a horse again:
And a Voice said: “All over the universe they have finished a day of happiness.” And looking down I saw that the whole wide circle of the day was beautiful and green, with all fruits growing and all things kind and happy.
Then a Voice said: Behold this day, for it is yours to make. Now you shall stand upon the center of the earth to see, for there they are taking you.”
I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. (33)
Oddly enough, something vaguely similar can happen in the case of space travel—perhaps the closest thing a “scientific” culture, a conquest consciousness, can get to a Shamanic Journey or Vision Quest. The journey to space, the home leaving, the rupture out of ordinary context, seems to be extreme enough to shake one at least a little out of the habits of fragmentation, distance, reason, and analysis. Our epistemology could be characterized as an epistemology of transcendence, or self-transcendence. Perhaps it should not surprise us then that an experience of self-transcendence precipitated by space flight could trigger a shift out of conquest consciousness. Yaden et al. (2016) wrote a study of self-transcendent experiences in space flight, noting that, “Viewing the Earth from space has often prompted astronauts to report overwhelming emotion and feelings of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole” (1). This is the experience we tried to consider earlier, the notion that someone could point, not to our “body” or to us as “an organism,” but could point to the Earth, and we might experience that as “me”—perhaps with the ordinary sense of me-ness, the habit of ego, dropped away. The authors write,
The overview effect, as the experience is called, refers to a profound reaction to viewing the earth from outside its atmosphere White (1987). A number of astronauts have attributed deep feelings of awe and even self-transcendence to this experience (e.g., Linenger, 2000; Mitchell &Williams, 1996; White, 1987). Astronaut Edgar Mitchell described it as an “explosion of awareness” (White, 1987, p. 38) and an “overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness . . . accompanied by an ecstasy . . . an epiphany” (Hunt, 2015, p. 73). White contends that the overview effect refers more generally to the experience of viewing common landscapes from far above, such as from a mountaintop, though the view of Earth from space provides the quintessential version of this experience (White, 1987, p. 1).
Astronauts attribute short- and long-term emotional benefits to these experiences (White, 1987; Stuster, 2010), but the scientific community has only recently begun to take a serious interest in these effects. (2)
They offer a sampling of astronaut experiences:
It’s hard to explain how amazing and magical this experience is. First of all, there’s the astounding beauty and diversity of the planet itself, scrolling across your view at what appears to be a smooth, stately pace . . .
I’m happy to report that no amount of prior study or training can fully prepare anybody for the awe and wonder this inspires. (NASA Astronaut Kathryn D., as cited in Robinson et al., 2013, p. 81)
I had another feeling, that the earth is like a vibrant living thing. The vessels we’ve clearly seen on it looked like the blood and veins of human beings. I said to myself: this is the place we live, it’s really magical. (Chinese Space Program Astronaut Yang Liu, as cited in Chen, 2012, p. 288)
If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say [sic], “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried. (NASA Astronaut Alan Shepard, as cited in Nardo, 2014, p. 46)
You . . . say to yourself, ‘That’s humanity, love, feeling, and thought.’ You don’t see the barriers of color and religion and politics that divide this world.” (NASA Astronaut Gene Cernan, as cited in White, 1987, p. 37)
You identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans . . . and that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift when you go around the Earth . . . you look down and see the surface of that globe you’ve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down there and they are like you, they are you—and somehow you represent them. You are up there as the sensing element, that point out on the end . . . you recognize that you’re a piece of this total life. (NASA Astronaut Rusty Schweikart, as cited in White, 1987, p. 12)
Before I flew I was already aware how small and vulnerable our planet is; but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind’s most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations. (German Cosmonaut Sigmund Jahn, as cited in Hassard & Weisberg, 1999, p. 40)
The feeling of unity is not simply an observation. With it comes a strong sense of compassion and concern for the state of our planet and the effect humans are having on it. It isn’t important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth. (Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Artyushkin, as cited in Jaffe, 2011, p. 9)
From space I saw Earth—indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone. (Syrian Astro naut Muhammad Ahmad Faris, as cited in Hassard & Weisberg, 1999, p. 1)
You’ve seen pictures and you’ve heard people talk about it. But nothing can prepare you for what it actually looks like. The Earth is dramatically beautiful when you see it from orbit, more beautiful than any picture you’ve ever seen. It’s an emotional experience because you’re removed from the Earth but at the same time you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before. (NASA Astronaut Sam Durrance, as cited in Redfern, 1996, p. 1)
During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is re-shaped; having seen the sun, the stars and our planet, you become more full of life, softer. You begin to look at all living things with greater trepidation and you begin to be more kind and patient with the people around you. (3-4, 6)
These passages should bring to mind Rumi’s, “This is certainly not like we thought it was!” I think it can be all-too-easy to read this as “merely poetic” musings after a really cool experience. We should at the very least hold tenderly, in ongoing re-membering, such phrases as, “no amount of prior study or training can fully prepare anybody for the awe and wonder this inspires,” “you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before,” “During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is re-shaped,” “the earth is like a vibrant living thing,” and, perhaps most of all, “The feeling of unity is not simply an observation.” Not simply an observation, but something that can shift one’s way of life, and even prompt a search for other ways of knowing, as in the case of Edgar Mitchell, who, though scientifically trained, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), which has done important and rigorous work to document so-called “para-normal” phenomena, other ways of knowing. Publications done at IONS have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals—research which I think a good number of philosophers would find dubious, but which they also likely know little about—and thus do not realize that it exceeds the standards of most published science.
Robert Thurman, in his foreword to the book, Living Deeply, invites the reader to imagine taking a trip into space:
You’re there in the vastness of outer space. You see all the stars shining majestically, unobscured by lights from any cities. You look down and see something that looks like a round, opalescent, glistening, shining jewel. You can see the blue of the oceans, the white of the clouds, the brown streaks of the deserts, the gray mountaintops, and the green of the jungles and forests. And of course, you’re with Edgar, so you’re hoping you’re going to get back safely to this jewel called Earth.
You’re having a vision of the unity of life on this planet. You may also be aware simultaneously that there are infinite numbers of such jewels in the universe. But this is yours—your home. It is also the home of six billion other human beings and many trillions of other life forms. As you look, you feel a wonderful sense of oneness and togetherness with all of those beings living on this thin, delicate film on the surface of molten rock under a thin layer of air—like the fuzz on a peach.
As you look down at this jewel, you have a little tinge of sorrow about the foolish people who are destroying the basis of life on this planet. It doesn’t frighten you too much, though, for you realize that there must be some degree of wisdom, generosity, love, and compassion to match the beauty of Mother Earth, Mother Gaia.
From this perspective of deep space, you may then do what the Tibetans call offering the mandala. By mandala they mean the whole of the protected zone wherein life, mind, and spirit can thrive. You notice that there is an element in you that is possessive about this planet. In a way, even your own mind has a little element of what those foolish people who try to conquer and exploit life have in them. You may become aware that sometimes you, too, feel like you own the place. And yet you realize, from that capsule in deep space, that no one owns it. You can then imagine that you pick up the entire planet very gently in your hands—and you give it away. If you believe in angels, you give it to them. If you believe in deities, you give it to them. If you don’t believe in all of that, you just give it to the enlightened beings. You give it away to wisdom. You detach yourself from a sense of ownership, and as you do this, you realize that you are a guest. And you realize that this ultimate generosity is the basis of true happiness.
. . . By transforming our consciousness, we participate in the transformation of the world. Each of us has the capacity to shift from a dominator worldview to one in which we realize life is a precious gift; we understand what a privilege it is to be alive. . . .
. . . a sense of unity and connection is part of most world traditions. It certainly is very much a part of Buddhist philosophy, which I describe as “engaged realism.” Buddha’s discovery, so long ago, was that suffering comes out of ignorance of the true nature of reality, and from this ignorance arises an attachment to the control and domination of the Earth and the life that inhabits it. While we may be drawn to worldly delights, the Buddha observed that people’s core needs are more basic, dealing with the meaning of life, sickness, old age, death, and suffering.
. . . . Buddha was a scientist—a noetic scientist. He understood that the most important factor in the quality of life for a human being is how the person’s mind is managed. From this perspective, transforming our consciousness is the most important work we can ever do. And today, as I travel with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, he always tells us that we should not think that the solution is to all become Buddhists, but rather that we should explore for ourselves ways of training and educating the mind, developing the emotions, becoming aware of ourselves, managing our negative habits, and detoxifying ourselves from our mental toxins.
This can be done, he tells us, if you are a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a secular humanist or something else. The goal is to free our minds from suffering by understanding who we really are. What the Buddha discovered is that the nature of reality is bliss. Of course, he didn’t say we have to believe that, but he encouraged us to investigate for ourselves, and he reported that this is what he himself discovered. Not from a place of fanatic, fundamentalist spirituality, but from a place grounded in a deep respect for the mystery of life and a consciousness that sees the connections rather than the appearance of separation.
What is needed today is an expansion of the noetic sciences—the kind of sciences that allow us to understand our inner being. As we explore the nature of consciousness, we can see that the root cause of the destruction of this planet is the toxins of our mind, especially delusion, hatred, and greed. Hatred produces war, greed produces industrial overproduction and pollution, and delusion makes us want to do all of that but keeps us miserable anyway. Noetic sciences should be a national and even international priority, allowing each of us to be the scientist of our own experience, our own way of knowing and being in the world.[1]
We have a tendency to dismiss the sorts of experiences that a “noetic science”—perhaps what Nietzsche would have called a Joyful Science (Gaya Scienza)—might invite us to inquire into, experiences we might otherwise seek to verify for ourselves by running the experiment of our own lives. We dismiss them in part because of the kinds of fallacies of thinking Dewey, James, Nietzsche, and other philosophers tried to get us to face. James certainly comes to mind, because of his cogent critique of what he termed “medical materialism”:
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William’s melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion — probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’s delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc.
A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them ‘nothing but’ expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism’s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which, — and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition.
Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures, and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor’s body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.
Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.
When we speak disparagingly of ‘feverish fancies,’ surely the fever process as such is not the ground of our disesteem — for aught we know to the contrary, 103 degrees or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is either the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.
When we praise the thoughts which health brings, health’s peculiar chemical metabolisms have nothing to do with determining our judgment. We know in fact almost nothing about these metabolisms. It is the character of inner happiness in the thoughts which stamps them as good, or else their consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs, which make them pass for true in our esteem.
Now the more intrinsic and the more remote of these criteria do not always hang together. Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most ‘good’ is not always most ‘true,’ when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience — we shall hereafter hear much of them — that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to every one; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end. (23-5)
Because of our whole way of life and our style of thinking—and because of the demands of an epistemology of practice-realization, a way of knowing and being rooted in practice-and-realization—we cannot help keeping certain data at a distance. We hear about visions, conversions, ecstasies, and so on that we cannot help thinking about as neurological events that don’t correspond to any clearer, truer, and/or more subtle reality, despite the fact that the so-called noetic quality of these experiences gives them a feeling of greater reality than the one the medical materialist (usually an atheist) takes as real—another fact the materialist readily attempts to dismiss. Nevertheless, as one group of researchers summarized their findings:
Religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSMEs) are often described as having a noetic quality, or the compelling sense that the experience feels “real.” In this exploratory, multimethod study, 701 participants completed questions about the subjective qualities of their RMSEs, reported the impact of their RSMEs on various life domains, and provided written descriptions of their experiences for quantitative linguistic analysis. The majority of participants (69%) reported that their RSMEs felt “more real than their usual sense of reality.” This quality of realness was associated with positive self-reported impacts on family life (r = .16), health (r = .22), sense of purpose (r = .29), spirituality (r = .30), and reduced fear of death (r = .24). Participants who reported experiences as feeling more real used more language referring to connection, a greater whole, and certainty (“love,” “all,” “and,” “everything”) and fewer first-person pronouns, cognitive processes, and tentativeness (“I,” “me,” “think,” “probably”). (Yaden et al. 2017: 54)
We can suggest here again that maybe our style of consciousness and our way of knowing is a symptom, and that we would better call that style of consciousness the thing that needs healing, as evidenced by its effects in the world.
While we might think of “mystical experiences” as “beyond the limit” in philosophy and science, perhaps we should consider at least some of them as the necessary medicine for the kind of philosophizing we ordinarily do in the academy, in the culture, and in our everyday lives when we live under the influence of a conquest style of consciousness. Perhaps some kinds of knowing only come from, not fevers or “drugs,” but rather from practices of Nature-Culture, such as meditation and simply spending time in Nature, developing an intimate relationship with Nature, one we cannot get from books or lectures. They may also come from certain kinds of traditional Shamanic practices, including the use of holotropic medicines (sometimes referred to as “psychedelics”).
A wide range of experiences seem to trigger a self-healing process with respect to this wound of twoness, of distance, of subject-object/self-world/Culture-Nature/Mind-Nature/profane-sacred split.
Turning toward wholeness means freeing ourselves from fragmentation. We face some major challenges with this, because our entire culture and its “economy” root us in fragmentation. This happens so pervasively that we cannot genuinely imagine our way free of it. To become free requires the capacity to think thoughts we cannot currently think, to imagine possibilities we cannot currently imagine.
This disease of fragmentation and our conquest consciousness in general get strongly reinforced by our language and our whole manner of organizing our lives together. These two issues go together, but let’s focus a little more on language at first—language and fragmentation—and then connect it with time.
[1] In delightful resonance with the passage from Chesterton we considered in the previous post in this series, Thurman also relates the following:
Buddha was not a religious prophet, but he was not an atheist either. He actually was said to have met the Hindu god Brahma during his transformative experience. In a state of meditation, he traveled with his subtle body-mind into the heavens. He came into the throne room, and Brahma was there with all the other little godlings. And Buddha said, “Oh great Brahma, I hear you are the world creator. Since you created it, you must know how it works. I am determined to discover how the world works, so please tell me.” At first dismissive of Buddha, Brahma later called to him on his way out of heaven. “I can’t let you leave without giving you a proper answer,” he said. “You see, the thing is, I didn’t really create it, and therefore I don’t know how it works. I’m just the biggest shot around here. But these godlings think I did create it and they think I know how it works and they feel secure in my protection. If I had said to you in front of them, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ they would have had an identity crisis, and we’re a little short of shrinks here in heaven. But you’re going to be a Buddha in a future life, and you will know how it works and in that time you have to do two things. One, come and tell me. I’m a quick study; I am “God,” after all. And two, tell the human beings that when things go terribly wrong for them—when their children die, they have a terrible accident, there’s a disaster or a catastrophe—tell them it’s not my fault. I’m not in total control. I do my best for them. But it’s all our mutual karma. It’s our entire mutual collective situation that draws these difficulties down upon us.”